Mother Knows Best

Kari Barbic

March 28, 2011 2:51 PM

The New York Times has launched its new online subscription plan today. And Lisa Belkin of the Times parenting blog, Motherlode, is dutifully advertising the great opportunity readers have to pay for online content in her post today.

A number of you have written to ask my personal opinion of digital subscriptions. Like everyone else, I wish there were a way to pay the hefty cost of producing this remarkable newspaper with online advertising alone. But I also understand what it takes — what it costs — to create this breathtaking entity every day. And I don’t use that word lightly. What The Times has created online, what we assume we can access with a few keystrokes, takes my breath away. I have come to accept as a given that I can enter this site and the world will be explained to me, in real time, and in intricate detail. I am willing to pay for that.

Only $8.75 per week to have the New York Times staff "explain the world" to me. Yes, I can see how that thought would take one's breath away.